1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an image service providing apparatus and a recording medium and, more particularly, to an image service providing apparatus and a recording medium which provide an image service related to video data representing, e.g., a video image photographed by a photographing device.
2. Description of the Related Art
A photographing device such as a so-called digital camera having the following configuration has rapidly become popular in recent years. That is, an object is photographed by an image pickup device such as a CCD, an analog image signal obtained by photographing is converted into digital image data, and the digital image data is stored in an information storage medium such as an IC card. Since the photographing device such as a digital camera generally handles a photographed image as image data, it has been easy for the image data to be stored in a storage medium and carried or electrically transmitted.
For this reason, when, for example, a photographed image was required to be printed, the photographed image was stored in a medium and carried or electrically transmitted to request that the photographed image be printed. In order to easily deal with such a print order, order information for printing a photograph is constituted by information related to an orderer and information in which order contents are described, and is recorded on a medium such that the order information can be read by a computer. The medium makes it easy to execute a print order (for example, see FIG. 1 in pp. 3-4 in Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open (JP-A) No. 10-283404).
However, in recent years, a digital camera which can photograph a video image has been in circulation. In the digital camera, a video image is a data group in which still images are continuous in a time-series, and a video image file constituted by the data group is handled as video image data, so that photographing of the video image can be easily realized by a digital camera which can photograph a still image. An order for printing the video image can be placed by exhibiting the video image file.
However, when a video image photographed by a digital camera is handled as a video image file, the first still image in the video image file is often displayed when the video image is displayed by a computer. For this reason, a user who refers to the displayed still image confuses photographed images included in the video image file with mere still images, and thus the user may place an order for printing the still images. In this case, a print service trader prints all the images in the video image file, and provides large numbers of prints to the user on the basis that the articles have been ordered.
When an order of printing images is placed from video images photographed by a digital camera, a video image file is exhibited as original data because an object to be ordered is the video image file and because all the still images (photographed images) included in the video image file are printed. More specifically, it has been difficult to decide whether all the photographed images in the video image file or some of the photographed images should be printed.